


Something Vague

by sunshinestealer



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-20
Updated: 2015-10-20
Packaged: 2018-04-27 07:08:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5038699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunshinestealer/pseuds/sunshinestealer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aranea calls a meeting of her fellow ghost trolls, recently-dead and wondering if the fractured friendships and other relationships between them are ever going to be the same again. (They're not.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Something Vague

“I stopped breathing today.”

Aranea’s fingers fiddle with the edge of her skirt as she said this, sat on her knees in a semicircle with the ten other trolls she had joined the game with. The ten other trolls she had followed into the afterlife.

Well, eleven, actually, but Meenah was off… elsewhere. She had to tell the others to stop asking, because what felt like sweeps of traversing through different dream bubbles had uncovered hide nor hair of Meenah. The pink moon still hung in the sky, and of course, Aranea knew that Meenah must be hiding herself up there somewhere — but there was no way to travel to it, even with her god-tier flying abilities. Meenah had made sure she would remain up there in peace, it seemed.

The trolls had been brought together by this stupid game, and bound together in death. The group were still prone to immature squabbling and enough petty drama to fuel the most ridiculous soap opera plot-lines. Tensions between certain individuals had gotten so bad that some of them couldn’t stand being in the same room any more. Some made their dislike apparent, but others - rather more painfully, Aranea thought - simply pretended everything was going well, while complaining behind their ‘friend’’s back to anyone who was still listening.

Naïvely, Aranea hoped that by calling everybody together to a single lawnring and discussing any issues, this could alleviate the ennui of the first hundred sweeps of the afterlife. She tried suggesting that since they were all stuck together, they may as well try to get along.

She had conjured up a simple campfire, and cook-alized biscuits, hoofbeast milk, crackers, marshmallows and even some tempered dark chocolate. Not that ghosts needed to eat, but a welcome distraction all the same. Kankri had vetoed the food option, however, stating how offensive it might be to Kurloz. For the record, he just sat silently beside Mituna as the latter scarfed down a messily-constructed s’more.

“Welcome to the club,” said Rufioh, in his typical, awkward way. A wiggler’s idea of how a cool, if slightly nerdy teenager acted. “Any breathers still about, or…?” He gave a look to Damara, chuckling nervously as Horuss loomed beside him.

Damara just shook her head.

_Great. This isn’t awkward at all, is it?_

Aranea frowned, poking a lilac marshmallow onto the sharp end of her stick. Why did these conversations and meetings have to be so awkward? Why did they make her feel like she couldn’t talk at all? She knew that she was quite disliked by most of the group. Even with the friendly, polite Beforan façade, she knew from mind-reading that being amiable with somebody or even conversing about mutual interests was never a guarantee that they liked you.

As she was pondering on this, Kurloz caught her line of sight — and smiled. Just _smiled_. Stupid mime. Aranea sent back a false smile; both of them fully aware of their mutual dislike. Back when they used Trollian and Prongle, Kurloz’s sole description of Aranea was that she was a “SCARY DEVOTED KINDA BITCH.” Even if he meant it completely harmlessly, she’d never forgiven him for that. As well as everything else that happened during the game that proved to her that he was not trustworthy. It had taken some work, but she’d recently managed to seal off her mind from highblood psychic intrusion. Kurloz found this seemingly amusing, and had done the same. Where before Aranea could scratch the surface of his mind and discover the current dominant emotion or maybe even a fully-composed thought or two, now it was howlingly empty. He was up to something, definitely.

“Are there any issues to discuss?” Aranea asked, jolting a little as an ember burned her finger.

Meulin peered down at the notebook containing her latest fanfic. 100,000 words, all beta-read by Aranea. Quite juicy in some parts too. She looked to Kurloz, whose lips tightened. 

“Nothing,” she offered up.

That facsimile of a human instrument appeared in Cronus’ hands. Aranea was well aware that this state of limbo was not exactly conducive to keep oneself sane, but the sea-dweller had descended further and further into hopelessness. He crushed any sentiments of positivity within the group, keeping mostly to himself and his hobbies. At the same time, he complained about nobody giving him the time of day, because… well, nobody wanted to be around him. Aranea had enjoyed pleasant evenings, listening to the jangling metallic noises of the ‘guitar’ strings, only for Cronus to bring up some horrid event and make her feel awfully guilty, while he himself avoided the issue and absolved himself of any blame.

_“Remember when you and Porrim were together? I made that happen. I knew you two were a perfect match… and it’s your fault that it didn’t quite work out. Not mine. Don’t shoot the auspistice, Aranea. Maybe you and Meenah would work out if you weren’t her second damn shadow, acting like a moirail when you have no intention of being anything like that to her. Stringing people along, inviting them into your parlour only to devour them, take away their happiness and leave these poor saps as dried-out husks. You really are a spider, aren’t cha?”_

You had lost your temper that one time, hollering abuse at Cronus until he slunk off back to another dream bubble. But, when you all arrived back in the central hub… you realised Cronus was never going to apologise, and there would be no outlet for your more negative feelings. Except for a kismessitude. Disgusting. She’d hardly ever spoken to him since.

He started strumming, eliciting the same reaction as those humans had in that old time travel movie, when the young troll performs acapella slam poetry before the crowd, who had previously been enjoying the sound of the orchestra. Most just ignored him — from a quick scan of everybody’s minds, Aranea could tell that the trolls were simply being polite. Except for Damara, who wanted to slam the instrument down onto her knee and watch as Cronus cried. Well. In a more X-rated kind of way. Aranea cringed.

Porrim kept Kankri close beside her, chiding him for almost burning himself. Poor kid — you did feel sorry for him at some points. Trolls with a unique mutation such as his were still subject to having a jadeblood culler — and Porrim took her duty more seriously than most. There were even pictures of Kankri as a wiggler in the orphanage that she kept in her purse to show on special occasions. She still licked her handkerchief to rub dirt off of Kankri’s face, darned his socks and insisted on him wearing his sweater. The lurid shade which, apparently, would have gotten him murdered on Alternia.

Aranea hadn’t spoken to Porrim in quite a while. Especially not since the breakdown of their relationship. It had been painful. Their dirty laundry had been left out on social media for everybody to see, courtesy of some unknown party — the likely culprit being a spiteful Damara. The vicious gossip that had spread through the grapevine had also been hurtful, and while Porrim had the ability to effortlessly stride out of the scandal, Aranea had fallen about as far as one could possibly go.

Damara stood, walking off. She flipped the bird at everyone as she went, and when Rufioh tried to follow, shouting could be heard from the trees.

Rufioh returned, rubbing the back of his neck like you’d only ever seen trolls in anime do. “She’s… headed back.”

Aranea's grasp of troll Japanese was limited, but the tone of that conversation was rather… angry. If Horuss could understand, he’d be blushing blue and gently chiding the lowblood in patronisingly simple English about her dreadful potty-mouth. 

Rufioh sat, folding his wings and lacing his fingers together. “So… uh… what’s the point of us all meeting again, doll?” His warm brown eyes peered at you, sat opposite at the other end of the semicircle.

“To discuss any… issues… and…”

Her words died in her throat. Come _on_ , who was this girl who’d replaced Aranea? The same Aranea who could go toe-to-toe with Kankri in terms of verbal spewage? She clenched her fists and cleared her throat to get everyone’s attention, speaking loudly and clearly.

“There was a troll poet who once said: hell is other people.”

“Sartre,” Kankri offered. Aranea cut him off before he could dive into a discussion about what his ideas meant, a discussion Aranea knew was informed only by the simple mid-grade textbooks that had been bought when Porrim took him out of the school-feeding system.

“Right. Now, Troll Milton’s ideas may not be agreed upon any more, but according to him, there’s three tiers to the afterlife. A place for those who performed good deeds, a place for those who did bad deeds… and a place for those in-between. Hell, full of demons and sinners and torture and fire as it may be, has been theorised to be a walk in the communal lawnring compared to the loneliness and depression that one must feel in a limbo such as this. Just waiting, _constantly_ , until… I don’t know, our sins are shriven or there’s some other cataclysmic cosmic event that lets us move on to the next life.”

“Oh, COME ON, girl.” Latula groaned. She had been snuggled into Mituna’s chest on the other side from Kurloz, just content to rest against him. It was working — he had kept so quiet that it was perfectly possible he had been soothed to sleep, eyelids closed beneath the visor. “I know you’re a Sufferist! We all know! And that’s rad and all, but this jabber is just so _dreary_.”

Kurloz gave a thumbs-up.

Aranea hastened. “If you’ll allow me to _continue_ ,” she said pointedly, “then you’ll see I’m getting to the point. Sartre said that ‘hell is other people.’ We are in a state of limbo, are we not? Why should we have to lose our minds and keep on falling out with each other?”

The guitar strumming stopped. Cronus chewed his cigarette and gave a miserable look that Troll Morisy would be proud of. “Are you suggesting that we should keep up the happy-flappy harmonious bullshit? ”

“Indeed,” Kankri said. “Anthropological psychologists have suggested that trolls are, biologically speaking, solitary creatures. From a sociological standpoint, it can be argued that our sense of altruism and ‘pitying thy neighbour’ descends from not just sweeps of a theocratic hegemony that told us to do precisely that, but also the long rule of Her Incandescent Beneficence. You might also recall, Aranea, your own diagnosis of anti-social personality disorder, which you brought up in a group conversation at one point. While developing such a selfish mindset has been deemed a necessary evil in order for you to avoid being eaten by your lusus, you yourself are a victim of being forcibly amiable, are you not? You have to put up a sociable façade so people didn’t ostracise you, even as you found better company in books and poems. You might want to introspect, and realise that, no, perhaps trolls don’t _want_ to be happy all the time, nor do certain trolls _want_ to socialise, even in dire circumstances as these. Happiness might just be an illusion, for those of us who subscribe to the realist school of thought. Do you really need to make Cronus - or anybody else who isn’t vocalising their concerns - any more miserable than they already are? We do in fact realise that in this limbo we are in (limbo coming from a doctrine that unfairly excludes the faith of the purple-bloods), we only have ten other trolls, besides ourselves. And indeed, thoughts and memories are carried over and manifest as aggressions that result in wounded feelings and maybe even the desire to do harm to others as them have done harm unto you. Excuse me for the Sufferist remark there. To end my thesis, I will reiterate for the benefit of those who may have tuned out at any point. Trolls are perhaps indeed _asocial_ , and it is only our society that has ever forced us to be good Beforan citizens. Therefore, being as we are in the afterlife, we have absolutely no obligation to force ourselves into a state of euphoria for the sake of not appearing depressed,” (Horuss cringed) “and nor should somebody have to act constantly friendly towards another for the sake of appearing like things are still going on as normal.”

He leaned back, almost gloating in the stunned silence. It was too bad that nobody had told him the real reason for the silence was that sometimes the sheer brain processing needed for such a nonsensical tirade rendered the host speechless.

“Er… all right.” Aranea continued, taking a nervous glance around. Kurloz seemed to be chuckling to himself, and Cronus was fiddling with his cell-phone, having put the ‘guitar’ to one side.

The anti-social personality disorder jibe was a little harsh. Aranea reckoned she sometimes had _more_ empathy than half of the trolls she had been acquainted with. One troll had suggested she was a ‘creepy hanger-on’ while she was alive, simply for arranging flowers for her classmates who had passed away, and cheerily bringing gift baskets around to their recently bereaved friends. Recently bereaved because of her, that is.

But, yes… deep down, there were feelings that she did not care for any of these trolls whatsoever. She was a quick study and had learned to emote better than any of those award-winning movie actors. 

When Meenah had been plucked from obscurity, her blood colour discovered and lauded as the new heiress, she was placed into the obscure cliffside school Aranea attended. The heiress had flopped down in the perpetually-empty chair beside Aranea, and declared that the cobalt-blood would be her friend “since nobuoydy’s else’s gonna be.” Aranea was honoured, to have her first real friend.  

On top of regular school-feeding sessions, Meenah would attend long hours of tutoring on political science, how to keep the trolligarchy, the purpleblood religious representatives and the Senate pleased, how to fend off coups, and historical examples of troll queens who had fallen due to their own hubris.

Not surprisingly, Meenah would often run away. And Aranea was her accomplice, each and every time. It wasn’t just the tedium of ruling over an entire planet that Meenah was running from, however — there were plenty of sea-dwelling suitors eager to become arm-candy for the new heiress.

Among them was Cronus. He arrived at Meenah’s temporary land-hive one afternoon, and the heiress found his hand-sewn cloak and wizard’s hat so amusing that she brought him in for tea. Aranea had finished her extracurricular club, expecting to find Meenah alone, and finding her hurtling underhanded insults towards the poor troll who thought magic was real.

(Admittedly, Cronus _could_ do magic. Or, just a really good illusory trick where he could make things levitate like a psionic, conjure animals out of the ether, shoot pure beams of light, and… No. Magic isn’t real.)

Usually, Aranea would creep in behind these suitors, bludgeoning them in the head and dragging their unconscious bodies towards the canyon where her lusus lay in wait. That was, if Meenah gave her approval, if the suitor had been particularly noxious. But this time, she instructed Aranea to lay off him, tucking her thumb back into her closed fist. She appreciated the historical humour behind the gesture, but not so much Cronus’ continued presence. Even before the game, he had a way of making a person feel bad about themselves, shifting all of his problems onto the other person and distracting them whenever they tried to talk about their feelings.

Still, it was good that Aranea was there as a buffer between Cronus and Meenah. The two would giggle about the stupid things Cronus said in the wee hours of the morning, in a blanket fort somewhere in the spookier parts of Aranea’s cellar.

Aranea sighed, coming back around from recalling those memories. Even for all the fights and gossiping from back when they were alive, there was at least _some_ social cohesion between the twelve trolls who played the game. Now it was all gone. And the trolls were all getting up to leave, heading back to the memories of their hives to spend time in solitude.

Hell really was other people.


End file.
